Monetizing Starcraft / LordJerith rant. Thoughts? - Page 36

On February 12 2012 18:27 FXOpen wrote:

Subscriptions are the ONLY way to make quick revenue from e-sports and forcing them is going to eventually be the norm. It will come to the point where GSL will not let people watch if they haven't subscribed. And rightly so. Why the hell should someone who spends a solid 500k on equipment, let you watch for free? This doesn't apply to small start ups such as my own events. But something like GSL which is BETTER quality than TV (if you have HQ) does not belong on free to air. And you do not DESERVE to watch it for free. Alot of time, effort money and skill has gone into their production. That being said, most people do subscribe to their content.. Rightly so.

On February 12 2012 23:51 Titorelli wrote:
I think we all just have to face the bitter reality then.... SC2 is just not sustainable with ad money only

On February 12 2012 23:49 Titorelli wrote:
How can ppl even compare the likes of Facebook or Google with SC2 or GSL LOL?!?!?
Pls (re-)read FXOBosses GREAT post if you just dont get it!

On February 12 2012 23:52 Talin wrote:


Then we may as well say that SC2 isn't sustainable period.

On February 12 2012 19:37 zul wrote:

I`m always grateful to read posts by people who are deeply involved in the eSport industry and especially you are very open with the community. much appreciated. But here you are wrong. If you have enough viewers you can make a living off of streaming. Here is a screenshot taken from the stream of a league of legends player (Hotshotgg) who often has 10k viewers on his stream and makes excellent money.

+ Show Spoiler +

On February 12 2012 23:54 Titorelli wrote:

Not in its current form I guess...

On February 12 2012 23:21 bouhko wrote:

First, you don't have ANYTHING to tell about where GSL belongs to. It's up to gom if they want to charge 100k$ for it or let it be free. You do not DESERVE to make me pay for your product either. I'll buy them if I find them interesting.

Now, if subscription becomes the norm for ALL stream, people will just stop watching. I mean, I started watching some random games on youtube, then moved on to watch tournament streams and then I subscribed to the GSL. If you remove all the free content, you won't get anybody new interested into paying for SC2 content.

Now the other problem is one of demand. The GSL is already running somehow year-long (Code A, Code S, GSTL). So I can watch 1h of high-quality SC2 per day. I don't really want/have the time to watch more. It's not I don't want to pay more, it's just I have no use for it. But I sometime watch some foreign tournament streams. If they stop being free, I'll just stop watching them
and you'll loose advertisement money.

Also, you are completely wrong on the business side of things. A LOT of tech start-ups company started up with free products : Google, Facebook, Linkedin, ... I could go on and listen hundred of succesful companies that make money out of ad-sponsored products. And I can guarantee you that running Google or Facebook cost more than the 500k$ needed to setup a studio :-)

I mean, by reading this thread, you can clearly see that there are some people that are willing to pay for some SC2 shows, but that they don't want to pay for everything. Now, these people are your consumers and if you want to run a SC2-related business, it's up to you to find a business model that allow you to make a living and satisfy your consumer. Telling your consumer what they should do is a really, really bad idea imho.

On February 13 2012 00:00 Timerly wrote:
It's funny how even people like Boss argue against the most basic principles of economics and consumer behaviour. To my knowledge no company has made profits by forcing something on its consumers without some monopoly. I also think that even GSL and such are still startups in relative terms. Do people really believe the actual hardcore fanbase for SC2 is that big? We need tons more internal numbers before saying anything of the like. Relative subscription rates for GOM, who bought which package...it's just not there for anybody but GOM, not even for Boss. You can talk all day, there's no basis. All kinds of different businesses have taken all kinds of different paths to success or failure. There are professionals in the most niche of sports and there are companies who live off the broadcasting. E-sports history tells us that making predictions is waaaay harder than it might seem even to the most experienced business people. Remember CS in 2000? Stuff got serious. The huge CPL and what came of it. WCG growth and decline. Nothing so far points to a clear direction.

My very personal opinion is that Blizzard should back all of this. The whole thing is built around people consuming their product. They wouldn't even have to make profits, any money from it would just flow back into their marketing budget which is enough to run 10 GSLs and might return quite a bit more in long term effects. Kotick likes exploiting franchises at least annually, obviously keeping people playing and wanting the next installment should be a priority in marketing, yet they choose to randomly dish out advertisement instead of turning SC2 into an even bigger phenomenon. You can make that stuff a trend, you need the opinion leaders in gaming, the hardcore crowd. I alone got like a dozen people to at least try SC2, about half of them bought it...and I'm far from the extremely hardcore crowd. I didn't pay for any events, yet I made SC2 grow. This is what should really matter here because those were at least 250$ worth of sales. Do I have to mention how multiplication and powers work? If that doesn't happen we can talk all day but SC2 won't get anywhere near the point it could go. Game lifespans are too short. Even BW had a dozen years to grow and still remained niche. You can't get the financial backing to make something explode without Blizzard's involvement.

Organisations like ESL do most stuff right. They don't go overboard on prize money, they keep the production quality up while travelling around the world and most important of all, they hedge their risks. Have multiple games in your leagues, guys, it doesn't hurt anybody. Why get all this setup only for SC2 when you could run CS, LoL, DotA and a dozen more tournaments with the same equipment? That's just wasting potential with your fixed costs being quite a huge chunk of your whole financial structure.

On February 13 2012 00:10 Talin wrote:
What makes you believe GSL is enough of a high quality product to attract enough customers to survive if they adopted a subscription model (and for the number of customers not to slowly drop off over time)?

It all comes down to whether GOM believes they can sell what they're currently offering for free or not and whether they will take a risk to find out. IMO they can't sell it, not with the abundance of completely free content available at all times.

On February 13 2012 00:02 FXOBoSs wrote:


As stated before, if e-sports has 300million views per minute, I will happily bow down to comparing them to facebook google and youtube. That makes ad revenue easily viable for successful business.

Do the math on supporting a business with 3.50-4.50 CPM on only major countries. Then tell me that e-sports and facebook are one in the same.

As I stated earlier, for e-sports business to be successful on ad revenue alone (Free media) you need 50k viewers at once to make it worth while. Which very very few are doing. Exposure is valuable if you use it properly, which its not being done. And a sponsorship model only works if you have other forms of revenue.

Its entirely possible to get sponsorship + fee + ad based model to work and be lucrative.

Products should be very much worth while to purchase before you purcahse them. For instance FXOpen's events ARE NOT ready to be purchase only.. And it will be a year or two until they are at that level. We have equipment to buy staff to hire etc etc etc.. GSL however, has quality better than television. IF you dont want to pay for it, I suggest you dont watch it, because eventually you most probably will have to pay for it. The quality is too good to be free.

The holier than now mentality of "supporting e-sports" is only a phrase used. There are plenty of people who actively support e-sports, but the majority do not. They use adblocker, they tune out when there is a 2 minute delay or break on a live stream, they bitch they moan they groan. You only have to search through countless reddit and TL threads to know this.

The community itself drops the average CPM rate by doing what they do best, complain about something they dont like. It might even be the loud minority, but still the noise makes a financial effect on the industry.

For someone to say "hey, i deserve this for free, and I should be allowed to use adblock" is totally stupid and essentially I would push for such person to be banned from every stream on the planet (although thats never going to happen).

I stick to my guns in saying that if you aren't prepared to pay for HIGH QUALITY content, such as the current GSL (not season 1 2 or 3) then you should probably stop viewing the GSL all together because fro them to keep a free stream in the 2nd half of this year would be financially stupid for them. The quality of games and production is too high to give for free...

Again, this would all change if you could provide 300 million viewers per minute to their stream. Then they can be happy to provide 0.20 cpm ads to all its viewers and make good money.

On February 13 2012 00:13 FXOBoSs wrote:



They already survive on subscriptions only. Do you get ads on your stream? No? Then they don't make money from you.

On February 13 2012 00:12 FXOBoSs wrote:


SC2 numbers are indecline not increase. Viewer numbers are in decline (outside of korea). The korean scene is starting to grow a good viewerbase and you can notice this at the gom studio with more people venturing towards it. GOM has been providing a free stream for a long time, with no revenue at all entering their coffers. They provide a product more than worth the money it costs. They have given plenty to the community, answered to feed back for more than 12 months and adjusted to fit to the community.
Their HQ stream is better than anything else out there and more stable, and they rarely have major stream issues of which they are quick to fix.
They are endorsed by blizzard (they have rights to the korean sc2 monopoly) and SHOULD monetize on it to expand further for the viewing experience and to support the players who are struggling financially.

If they continue to provide it free, with no ad revenue (which subscriptions is more cost efficient) then they will inevitably implode if a sponsor pulls its funding. If they were to create a very affordable HQ m/m subscription, they will support the growth of their business, as well as the industry as a whole. I dont see why if there was funding for it, GOM wouldn't pick up other games and increase the standard of content quality across the broad. At the moment only sc2 has decent production and regular streamed events.

If GOM is going to do BUSINESS right, they need to monetize correctly, where there is money. There is currently very little money in the sponsorship market, there is no merchandise thats worth buying and ad revenue is extremely low to the point that its laughable. Cheap subscription is the best way for GOM to monetize. GOM being the only entity who has a 99.99% ready product for sale.

In no way to I compare GOM to FXO's event. It would be insulting GOM. FXO is no where near as established as gom, and its entirely why we do not do quality cuts, or content prevention, or anything else for those who subscribe. Its merely a way to dodge ads and win prizes. And until my product is close to goms, I would never force subscriptions or hurt those who don't subscribe (except subscriber only chat because sometimes chat goes nuts).

So yeh, we can talk about this again when my product is super HD and sexified like GOM's.